How to Negotiate Your New Job Offer to Get The Most Money and Benefits!

Transcript:

On this episode of the personal finance podcast, how to become a negotiation killer with your next job offer.

And welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew founder of mastermoney. co and today on the personal finance podcast, we're going to teach you how to become a negotiation killer. With your next job offer. If you guys have any questions, make sure you sign up for the master money newsletter and respond to the master money newsletter when it comes out every single week.

And we'll be able to answer some of your questions. So if you go to master money. co slash newsletter, you'll be able to join the master money newsletter there and follow us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you want to help out the show.

Consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you want to watch this podcast, you could check it out on YouTube. If you go to the Andrew Giancola YouTube channel, that is my name. That's where we have all these shows now where you can watch them live.

And we're going to be doing a lot of cool stuff and building out a new studio for this podcast. So really, really excited about all of that coming forward here. Now, today I am pumped about this episode because we are going to be talking about a way that you can. And you know, if you've been a long time listener, you know, we talk about earning more money is the way to build wealth.

It is the number one thing that you can do with your wealth to be able to build more wealth. You can take a larger percentage of your income and you can put it towards stocks and real estate, your emergency fund, and be able to really build a tremendous amount of wealth because you focused on. Earning more money.

And then you learned how to keep more money. And that's what we teach you here at the personal finance podcast is a, how to earn more B, how to keep more C, how to reduce those taxes and D where the heck do you actually invest those dollars? And we talked to all of this stuff, everything, money management and everything wealth building is what we talk about here.

So. Diving into today's episode is we're going to talk through the portion of the job search process where you've already nailed the interview. And now it's time to get into heated negotiations. And we say heated lightly, this is actually gonna be a collaboration, but we're going to talk through how to get through heated negotiations with a brand new job offer.

Now, if you haven't heard our recent episode, if you are at your day job and you are listening to this podcast, you're like, Hey, I want to actually stay where I am. And I just want to, Earn more money where I am. We'll check out the episode we just had recently, where we talked about how to negotiate your salary.

That's a great one for you to check out. We have a step by step system that shows you exactly how to do this. And if you want to learn how to negotiate your salary, uh, we have a free ebook that we give you at mastermoney. co slash resources called finally get that raise. And it's going to have some of the scripts that we talk about here today in this negotiation episode.

And in addition, we're going to go through, um, some other systems that we have in place as well. So I think you'd really, really enjoy that if you haven't checked it out. Now today, number one is we're going to be going through just a couple of tips on your job search prior to getting in there. This is not a job search episode, but I'm going to give you some realistic tips, um, on some things that you need to just think through and kind of get your mind going on this.

Then we're going to talk about how to negotiate your salary as a new hire. So first off. Is I want you to know that success in the job search is 10 percent what companies do. And it's 90 percent how you react and adapt. We cannot control the process or the decisions, but we control how we show up. And what I mean by that is we control how we prepare for job interviews.

We control our preparation upfront. And the only way to do that is you got to be the hardest worker in that interview process. You can't control the decisions that are made. You can't control if certain people don't go up to bat for you, even though you've done all your networking, but you can control that you've networked.

So one big thing is when you start to have these conversations with people, you got to find somebody within that group that you are interviewing with that is going to go up to bat for you. That is one of the bigger things that you need to make sure that you are doing. Now, people internally are going to have an advantage with this as long as they played their cards, right?

But if you are coming into a new situation, you've got to make sure that you're impressing some of those people that are in the room interviewing you. And once you do that, then you get to the negotiation process. They're going to go up to bat for you when you start to negotiate your salary. And so really important to control how we show up by making sure we practice, we prep, we do all of our research on this company and we figure out ways that we can help this company improve its bottom line and what its core values are.

You look at the core values of the company and you figure out exactly what things they need and what things they want done. And you focus your interview process on that. So that's number one. Number two, the job search Is boiled down to a sales process. You are the product, meaning you alone are the person who's actually the product, your resumes and your cover letters.

Guess what? Those are, those are your marketing documents. And then your interviews. Those are your. Are your sales pitches, and so it is really, really good idea to invest your time and learning more about sales and marketing if you're trying to figure out. Hey, I don't really know where to invest my dollars in the corporate world into improving myself, sales and marketing.

Those two things. In addition to negotiation will help you tremendously in the corporate world or tremendously in the blue collar world as well. Knowing those three skills, sales, marketing negotiation will absolutely change your life. And so what I would do is I would focus some time on looking at some of these and we can give you some books to kind of go through some of this process.

Getting to yes is a great sales book. Never split the difference is an amazing book. About negotiation. In fact, a lot of tactics that we were talking about today. We got those from never split the difference in Chris Foss. Chris Foss is an absolutely amazing negotiation teacher. So make sure you check out that book as well.

And there are some other books that we can leave down in the show notes that we can have you check out. Uh, but make sure you start to study sales and marketing and really, really. Understand how that works, especially marketing yourself, marketing products. Now, when you start to read some of these books, they may be talking about marketing products, flip that to yourself, and it's really going to help you tremendously when you go through this.

And then number three, the third thing I want to talk about at the top of the show, before we dive into this system is. There's a three step thing that I want you to think about by age here is your twenties. I want you to optimize for experience. I want you to try to get the best experience possible in your twenties so that you can leverage that experience later on and make a lot more money.

So your twenties are for experiences. Your thirties, I want you to optimize for salary, meaning I want you to maximize the amount of money that you can make within your thirties. And if you're in your thirties and you're like, I got started a little late, and this is something that I'm not really that capable of doing, then I want you to optimize for your salary.

I want you to start to get those experiences now and then leverage those salary pieces in your forties. And then I want you to optimize for your assets in your forties and beyond, meaning that you're leveraged your salary already. So your income has gone up in your thirties and in your forties, I want you to optimize as much as possible to gain more assets.

Meaning you can gain either more time within the company. And, or you can gain more stock options, or you can do a lot of different things here. So there are three things I want you to think through, and we're going to do an entire episode on the job search process, because I have a bunch of systems that we can put into place where you can really leverage your wealth in the nine to five.

The nine to five is actually a great place to build wealth. Contrary to what people are going to tell you on Tik that you got to become an entrepreneur. You can become very wealthy in a nine to five job. I worked in the corporate world for a long time and I'm an entrepreneur now. And I made that leap only because I had the tools in place to be able to do so.

But as a nine to five earner, as a W two earner, you can definitely do some really, really cool stuff with your W two. And we'll do an episode on how to leverage that W two to maximize wealth and get rich. So we'll have that coming up soon as well. Now, as we go through some of this process, this is again, not to how to handle job interviews, but we're going to talk through how to negotiate your salary as a new hire.

And we are going to do that. Next. All right. So we're going to go step by step here in step one. This is after you've already gone through some of the interview process and you know, you're on your last interview, you're in the last piece of the process and you're about to start the negotiation of how much money you're going to make.

And I want you to be a stone cold killer when it comes to these negotiations. I want you to be the best possible negotiator you can possibly be when it comes to these negotiations. And let me say this up front. The number one thing I want you to be doing in presenting is how much value you can bring to the table.

You are so Selling yourself in these negotiations. And this is something that you definitely need to have as much information as possible at your disposal in order to perform at your best when you start these negotiations and you can hear it in my voice. I'm really passionate about this stuff because this is where the rubber meets the road.

This is where your wealth building ability is going to make a massive difference in your personal life. If you can master this skill, because imagine, for example, you can negotiate an additional 15, 000 on top of your salary, you could take that additional 15, 000. Hey, you can go on a couple of vacations a year with that.

In addition to maxing out your Roth IRA, in addition to putting more dollars in your HSA and your 401k. It's life changing stuff here that we're talking about. And this is a multi million dollar negotiation that you are going through when you start these negotiations. So it's a very, very important to make sure that you button this up.

So step one is I want you to use Glassdoor or another website. We'll go through a bunch of websites that you can utilize here today to find the average salary for your position. You should obviously be doing this before you even start the salary negotiation process. But if you haven't started doing that yet, then I want you to use a site like Glassdoor before you do this.

Now, the biggest thing is having data to back you up during a negotiation is a must. And employers can see right through someone who is not prepared. If you're not prepared, they're going to know. They're going to see that right away. And if they lowball you and you have no data backing you up as to why you're claiming you need to make more money, then It's never going to work.

You're never going to win the negotiation in that standpoint. The most informed can many times win just because they are the most informed. So make sure you collect as much information as possible about pay rates at your position. Okay. This is really, really important to do. Now, there are some other great places outside of Glassdoor to look at.

Glassdoor is starting to get outdated. So Indeed is one, uh, besides being a job search engine, Indeed also offers company reviews and sales. Another one is LinkedIn, which is obviously known for networking and people just saying congratulations over and over again to you if you do one little thing. But LinkedIn also has some great data, and they provide company reviews and insights and employee feedback, so that's a great place to look as well.

Comparably, if you've never heard of Comparably, this is a site that focuses on company culture and compensation comparisons. And they provide detailed company reviews and ratings. So comparably is a great site monster, which is like one of the older ones. It's way back in the day. I remember seeing monster commercials in like the early two thousands.

Um, but this is a job search platform that also has company reviews and salary information. Career bliss is one that offers company reviews, salary information, and job listings. There's one for women. So if you're a woman. A lot of women, the studies have shown, um, negotiate less than men. So ladies, I want you to be really well equipped and really listening on this episode.

I want you to make more. And so when it comes to this, there's one called fairy God boss, which is aimed at women. Um, and this also provides company reviews, job listings, and workplace insights, uh, specifically from the perspective of female employees. So I think that's a pretty cool one for women. There's also another one called in her site that does the same thing.

And then the muse provides company. Profiles, job listings and career advice. Job case is actually a social media platform for workers, and they actually talk through some of this stuff and have community discussions. And then vault vault, V. A. U. L. T. Specializes in company rankings, reviews and career guides.

So this is 11 different places that you can collect information from. There are a bunch more out there as well, but these are 11 different places that you can get more information and start to collect that information. Really important that you do this. Research upfront. I want you to kind of work on a Google doc or some piece of doc that will help you start to gain insights and information.

Now, if you are in the career world now, and you're not going to change jobs yet, I want you to be collecting information on some of your dream companies. Meaning that if you want to work at one of those dream companies, and you know, you're going to go after it one day, I want you to start collecting information.

Now, the more information that you have created doc for each company that you want to work with and get your top five, get your top 10 rolling and start to collect information. Super important that you do this because it's going to help you over time, gather information and kind of know what's going on within those companies.

Hey, I know it's work. I know there's a lot of stuff that you need to be doing, but it's going to help you earn a lot more money. Now, step two is I want you to understand something when it comes to these negotiations. You have to understand that this is a collaborative effort. effort. A negotiation is where two people are actually trying to collaborate.

This is not something where there should be any friction whatsoever. Do not get defensive or confrontational. If things do not go your way, you will never win any negotiation. If you start to get confrontational, it's counterproductive, it's disruptive, and it doesn't help you with the task at hand and Honestly, it will hurt your reputation significantly if you start to get confrontational.

So make sure you do not do this. And the reason for this is collaboration has a ton of benefits. One of which is it aims to find solutions that satisfy the interests of both parties. And that's what we really want here. Because if you're not in a collaboration, they go and hire you and they hire you for way more than they thought they should have.

This is something that's not going to be very long lasting. And number two is not going to help you build a relationship with that person. If you win a negotiation and it's a heated negotiation and there's friction there, you will have no relationship with that person going forward. They're going to say this person got one over on me.

They won the negotiation. But in the end, if they're a superior to you, this is not going to be a situation that you want to be in. Because now. The competition is on and now it's on like Donkey Kong and you're going to have to play corporate politics to get back in that person's good graces. You don't want to have enemies in the corporate world.

Instead, you want to be collaborative with people in the corporate world and or even in the blue collar world as well. And then number three is you can come to sustainable agreements, meaning that these are going to be so much more sustainable if you can come to a collaborative agreement instead of just winning one over on somebody.

You got to make sure that this is a collaboration. Otherwise, if it's your boss, for example, and something goes wrong, there's a recession, guess who they're looking to fire first. It's you because you want one, but some of your bosses will have the power to go up to bat, to try to get you out of the department when budget cuts come into play.

So making sure that you kind of have this sustainable agreement is going to be really, really important. So I think that a lot of people try to go into this, like it's a war and I'm calling this a negotiation killer, but a negotiation killer, guess what? Kills them with kindness too. So you got to kill them with kindness when you have these negotiations and come to a collaborative agreement.

I'm going to show you how to do that as we go through these scripts in a little bit. Now, the next step, so you've gone through this and understood that this is a collaboration. You've done your research on a bunch of different websites about the company. You have a lot of this information. And the research should really be done prior to starting the interview process.

Next, what I want you to understand is I do not want you to disclose what you make. At your current job in the interview. So when you're going through the interview process, their employer may ask you a couple of questions. Now, some States don't even allow your employer to ask what you make now. And honestly, this is extremely valuable information for a potential employer.

So they're going to try to squeeze this out of you in one way, shape, or form. And they craft ways to ask this without actually asking you directly. So if they ask something like how much do you want to get paid? Simply reply with something like a question. You can say like, what is this role offer? This puts you in the driver's seat and allows you to gather extremely valuable information about what they're willing to pay.

So you've got to answer their question with a question. This is going to be a question off here. And so what we're doing is we are really just redirecting that question back to them. And there's a bunch of reasons why this is really important. Number one is you don't want your future employer using your previous salary as a benchmark.

That is the last thing you want. You want to make more money. That's the reason why you're doing this job hop most likely in the first place. And so you're trying to earn more dollars overall. This also helps you avoid anchoring because the last thing we want to do is if you disclose your current salary, this is going to create an organic anchor, meaning this is a price anchor, a standoff point where this new company can use this.

As a guide, Hey, they accepted this amount of money and they're working for this amount of money right now. We can try to get close to this number. This is the anchor point that they're at and you don't want them to have an anchor point whatsoever. You want to make sure to aim for a salary that reflects both the position's true value.

In addition, something that benefits both you and the employer, but really, you know, you really want it to benefit you. Also, this kind of helps establish fairness and it demonstrates professionalism as well. There's more professionalism in, you know, starting a negotiation based on what the company is willing to pay.

And so making sure you just kind of deflect and ask a question back on what that role offers is going to help you stay in the driver's seat. Next, let's talk about knowing what you're worth. All right. So step four is I want you to know what you're worth. So I don't want you to let anyone tell you what you're worth.

Managers respect people more when they know what they're worth and it is completely expected for you to negotiate. So for some reason, the prospective manager seems caught off guard. This is a red flag. If you start a negotiation, if they're caught off guard, cause you're negotiating the same thing.

Salary. They offered you huge red flag to me. And so that means they may not be willing to negotiate for their raises and they're not going to be willing to advance your career. So if they don't want to negotiate with you now, they're definitely not going to negotiate later and they're not going to help you advance your career.

That is a huge red flag. I would not take a position if they did not let you negotiate. So that is one big one. Uh, you definitely want to talk through. And understand what you're worth now. Step five is I want you if you didn't have the opportunity earlier to ask for their number before revealing yours.

This is very, very important. They need to reveal their number before you ever reveal yours. Even if it's just a range. You want to be as informed as possible when you start these negotiations and finding out what their number is will give you the proper tools to move on to the next step. So do not fret at all.

If this is lower than what you expected, your potential employer may be utilizing a negotiation tactic. This is why knowing the going rate is so important. So remember, you do not have to accept anything on the spot whatsoever. If their offer coming in is lower than expected, you can take a day or two to think about this and never feel pressure.

To make an instant decision. You do not need to make an instant decision. Normally when you're having these conversations, they're going to try to pressure you into kind of thinking that you do, you don't, so don't try to make an instant decision. That's not something you need to do within a negotiation.

You can take time, think it through, think through what you want to say. Now, we've done a lot of prep work here. We're talking through doing a bunch of research. We are talking through how we want to approach negotiations based on not disclosing certain things. We want to talk about how this is going to be a mutual benefit for both parties, and we want to make this a collaborative effort.

And so, between all of these things, we're going to know what our worth is. Now it's time to give them your expected salary. Now there is a very specific way that I want you to propose your salary. It is contrary to what most people do, and this will allow you to maximize the amount of money you're making.

So if you don't podcast whatsoever, I want you to write this down. Look at this script in the ebook that we have linked up down below, and I want you to be able to go. And master this. So here is a script that you can utilize. And then after I'm going to show you how to actually use this script. So here's the script.

I am excited about this opportunity and talk about what you're excited about within the company there. And I know we can come to an agreement about the salary based on our market slash goals I have set for myself. I would expect to be at the blank to blank range, okay? Now here is the key to this entire script.

The low end of this range needs to be your highest number. Highlight this in your brain, underline it. Do whatever you need to do to remember this. So if you want to make 70, 000 per year, here's what you'd say. Based on the market and what I have seen at companies, your size, I would expect to be at the 70, 000 to 80, 000 range.

What does this do? What this does is it gives your potential employer room to negotiate above your highest number. So the number that you want, you want them negotiating above that number, because this a guarantees that you're going to get your highest number, as long as that salary ranges within their budget.

But B also allows the opportunity for you to make more money than you ever thought you would. I have seen people ask for more than their highest number and I've seen them get it. And so this is what I want for you is to make more than you even thought you would when you started these interviews. So utilizing this strategy allows you to have some extra breathing room as well because it's always good to have flexibility in any negotiation.

This allows you to have that flexibility. And even if your employer negotiates below the low end of your range, it will be much more likely that it'll be well within an acceptable number. You don't want them going too low and getting way below your range. So even if they try to go below your range, it's going to be much more acceptable because you are setting an anchor point.

And so this is really, really important to talk about. Now, the last thing I want to talk about here is obviously you could go back and forth on this negotiation and we can talk about in another episode, things that we can say when they try to deflect at us. But what I want to talk about here is negotiation is also more than salary.

And in this day and age, there's a lot of great options that you can negotiate when you get a new job offer. So, first of all, is your lifestyle. You can have flexible work hours. And so negotiating for a schedule that better suits your personal life, such as working for 10 hour days, or, you know, We're having a flexible start and end time all can be really, really powerful to your lifestyle.

And so flexible work hours, if that's what you value is going to be really important. And as we go through all of these other things that you can negotiate into this negotiation, I want you to think through which one of these actually do I value because you can negotiate the salary and you can get the salary you want.

And in addition, you can start negotiating this other stuff as well, especially if you're really valuable to this company, you know, you got them and you know, they really want you then try to add some of this in. Second thing is you can start to negotiate in remote work. If that's your thing, some people like to go in the office.

Some people like remote work more. If you like remote work more, start to negotiate that. Even if it's a couple of days a week, see if you can get remote work, uh, negotiated into some of this process. Additional vacation time. You're going to start a job and you're excited about a job and you really don't want to start negotiating on some of these points, but then all of a sudden you're going to get a year or two in the job and you're gonna say, I wish I had another week so I could go overseas and travel or I could travel hack, or I could, you know, spend more time with my family and spend more time with my kids.

Negotiate the travel time, negotiate the time off. It's really, really important for a lot of people. That's where your memories are going to be made. And that's why you're doing all this to earn all this money. Anyway, you can also negotiate professional development. So one other thing that you can do is like a previous company that I worked at, they'd actually pay for your master's degree.

A hundred percent. If you got it while you were still working there, I never took advantage of that. Uh, I probably should have because I was at that company for like six to seven years. And could have just got a free master's degree just by doing the work. And so if you can negotiate professional development, continuing education, training, certifications, all that stuff, you should try to take advantage of as much as possible.

For example, if you're a project manager, try to negotiate a PMP. So there's so many different things that you can negotiate. Another one is job title. One thing I used to do in the corporate world is I was a financial analyst for years. Could you put the word senior on top of that? Could you get a higher level title?

This is all negotiable. And so you can actually talk through this process and see if that's something you could do. Now here's some big ones also that I want you to look at. The next two are financially related and I want everybody to try to negotiate this in if they can. Is performance bonuses. So if you don't get the salary you want, maybe it's just below it.

See if you can start negotiating. The next step is to kind of talk through performance bonuses. Hey, yeah, we can't get there 'cause we just can't reach that budget. And you say, Hey, if I hit some of these performance metrics that are really valuable to you in this company, would you be able to agree to performance bonuses that we can put in writing?

And that's going to be something where if you're making them more money, there's no reason for them not to be incentivized to pay you more. So performance bonuses are great equity or stock options. This is another one that a lot of people need to take advantage of stock options are free money if you can get those.

And so seeing if you can. Take hold of some of those stock options, either at reduced rate or if they'll give you equity, that's even better. We're going to have a whole episode on equity and jobs with equity because there are some really cool things that you can do with that. And we'll talk through that.

Uh, relocation assistance. So if you are moving across the country, you need to think through, uh, negotiating relocation assistance. That could be a great one. And then You can talk through benefits like health care benefits, commuting costs, and some places even offer child care, or you can get them to offer child care.

Uh, so there's a lot of little things in there as well. Um, another one is if you're a parent or you're trying, you know, you want to have kids coming up soon, is parental leave is another one. That is one that you don't really think about until you have your first kid. If you only have like six weeks, Maternity or paternity leave, you're going to want more, and it's usually not enough.

After six weeks, your baby is still really, really young, and so you're going to want more times for them to get older, especially if you're going to have to put them into daycare after as well. You want to make sure that you have ample time with them and that they can actually grow old enough. Otherwise, they're going to be, you know, if they go to daycare too early, they're gonna be sick all the time.

It's just a mess. So parental leave is a big one for sure. 401k match. See if you can negotiate that. And there's a lot of other things that you can do here. Like travel perks. If you're going to travel a lot, you can negotiate all those pieces of travel. Can you get the points from your travel, that type of stuff.

So lots of things here that you can negotiate. And I think it's really, really important that you understand that even if you get close to your number, I think it's really, really important to try to negotiate more with some of these things. Cause you're going to earn a lot more money. Say, for example, you want to make 70 K they get you to 70 K.

Well, why don't you try to negotiate some bonus options, some stock options, try to increase your 401k match. All of those are going to make you a lot more money, and your salary is actually be a lot more if you can negotiate that. Now, I do have two scripts in the e book also talking about how to accept or reject an offer.

And so if you do that, and you come to an agreement on an offer, congrats. If not, I want you to make sure that you reject the offer politely. Never, ever, ever burn bridges. It's over. Always best to treat people with respect. It's really important that you do that. So you can say something like, I truly appreciate the offer and I wish we could have come to an agreement, but I do not think this role will fit my current needs and goals.

You were wonderful to speak to whatever their name is, and I hope we can collaborate in the near future. That one last thing is there's a piece in the book of Never Split the Difference, which I want everybody who is listening to this podcast to read, um, and he does have a question that he likes to ask a lot, Chris Voss, the author, uh, when it comes to jobs and salary negotiations, and this is going to kind of help you understand your value, and this is one piece that I failed to mention up front when it came to knowing your value, is when people ask you things like, how much did you make at your last position?

Or what are your salary requirements? You can say, I'll be happy to answer that. But first, how can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects critical to the company's future? Here's why this works. First, before you begin putting a price tag on yourself or anything, you have to begin establishing value.

And it's really anybody who quotes a price without having any idea of value It's just negotiating blind. And so you want to make sure that you ask that critical question when you get to the value proposition stage, because one of the most important things that you can do is establish value with your counterparts.

And you want to genuinely be involved in the company's future and prosperity. That's why you're working there. That's why you're going there so you can get promoted. You can make more money. And so asking this question is going to work because of that. In every negotiation, I want you to remember this, the person who is negotiating with you is asking himself or herself, what's in it for me.

What do I get out of this when I hire this person? What am I going to get? How are they going to help the company or my department look better? Or how are they going to help us increase revenue or productivity? How are they going to make our social media look good? How are they going to help us in it?

All of these different questions are going through their head. You've got to show them the value. And part of that is making sure that you see how you can be guaranteed to be involved in future projects. So I want to leave you guys with that question. And I want to make sure that you use that so you can show value as well.

Listen, I hope you guys got value out of this episode. If you follow some of these steps, I think you can make a lot more money in your salary negotiations. If you guys have any questions, again, jump on that master money newsletter and respond to any of those newsletters that I send out. That's the fastest way that I will see your question and truly, truly appreciate each and every single one of you listening to this podcast episode.

Our entire goal in this podcast is to bring you as much value as possible. And that is. All we want to do. So if you guys can subscribe to this podcast, that'd be absolutely amazing and truly helps out the show. Thank you guys again for listening and we will see you on the next episode.